José San Gil

Software Engineer

Exploiting PostgreSQL's power with Elixir and Ecto applications

When creating new apps with Elixir, we usually set up the database, then create users and groups tables, and proceed to define the rest of the data model according to the requirements. That's when we start coding the business logic and probably find ourselves writing a lot of access control logic for each query. Let's explore a different approach, that takes advantage of Postgres to write less code, keeping the important parts of the business logic agnostic to the language, but still enjoying the benefits of Elixir.

Objectives

Show a different way to write Elixir/Ecto/Postgrex applications using existent PostgreSQL features. Motivate the audience to explore alternative uses of PostgreSQL while writing Elixir applications.

Audience

José is a computer engineer from Caracas, Venezuela with 8 years experience. He started as a mobile application developer for Blackberry devices but quickly moved to web application and APIs. He has worked on different financial startups, coding infrastructure in Java, Python, and Javascript. He switched to Elixir, along with his team, and now writes Elixir 60% of his time.